Canadian artist Rodney Graham's exhibition entitled Through the Forest provides insight into the development of his complex body of work. The roots of Graham's work, which is influenced by 1970s Conceptual art and its way of thinking, lie in the adaptation of literary models. Born in 1949 in Abbotsford, a small town in British Columbia, Canada, Graham and his family moved to Vancouver in 1964. From 1968 to 1971, he studied art history and anthropology, as well as English and French literature, at the University of British Columbia.

Graham made his first large photographic work, 75 Polaroids, in 1976. This series of snapshots taken during a night-time walk through the forests around Vancouver was exhibited at Pender Gallery in Vancouver; it was Graham's first solo exhibition and marked the beginning of his career as an artist. 75 Polaroids contains elements that would be essential to his later works, namely his fascination with photographic processes, which transform objects from mere representations to autonomous images, and the idea of illuminating places at night via flash. Following this work, Graham experimented with a camera obscura he made himself and used to photograph archaeological sites during his stay at the American Academy in Rome. This line of work culminated in the series Rome Ruins (1978).

In 1984, the groundbreaking exterior installation entitled Two Generators was exhibited in Vancouver. Graham used a generator to produce electrical light, which he then used to illuminate a river near the university campus. In 1986, Rodney Graham came across an English translation of the story Lenz by the German Romantic author Georg Büchner. In that translation, Graham discovered a peculiarity of the layout: the words 'Through the forest' appear twice at points where the story continues from one page to another. For him, the text became a loop, as the term is used in film terminology, and a key element to later works. Graham constructed a reading machine that he employed to make this experience both vivid and visible. The first five pages on which he recognised this phenomenon in the layout of the text are arranged so that the rotational effect becomes tangible. The device created appears like a machine for seeing.

Later, Graham made other constructions, like those for Parsifal (1990 – 2009), which bring to the viewer's attention the infinite nature of a musical phrase that had been inserted into that opera. He also made objects that display books he found in antique shops. From there, it was only a small step to designing bookcases that resembled works of Minimalist art, mostly those by Donald Judd. An early example of this type of work is the bookcase-like object intended for the collected works of Sigmund Freud, on which Graham worked for years. A significant part of this exhibition is devoted to his early works and the development of his oeuvre; to this end, the exhibition is showing the archive of Rodney Graham's former Belgian publisher, Yves Gevaert, allowing viewers to make connections between his work and the material in this archive. An assortment of other materials has also been included, and it contributes to the understanding of how Graham's ideas developed. The Judd-like objects for books are derived from bindings and covers Graham himself designed.

In 1997, Rodney Graham was invited to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. For this occasion, Graham made an influential film, Vexation Island, based on Hollywood movies and the story of Robinson Crusoe stranded on an isolated island. Graham plays one of the main characters and the film made him instantly famous in the art world.

This exhibition focuses on the films he made later, which, on a formal level, further the tradition of conceptual-text works and light phenomena in terms of themes and motifs. For the film Coruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), Graham strewed ground cinnamon onto a burner of the stove in his kitchen and filmed the glowing specks; the theatre space in which this film is shown has the same dimensions as the kitchen where it was made. Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) is an installation of a surrealistic image. Graham acquired an almost unused 1930s typewriter from a second-hand shop in Vancouver. First, he documented the object photographically, in the style of New Objectivity; he then covered it with flour to create a poignant image for words falling silent. Torqued Chandelier Release (2005) is related to the light phenomena explored in the cinnamon film, both dealing with images that employ light effects, thus relating to photography in another way.

Another part of the exhibition deals with the role of the artist. In the film Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, 1969 (2006), Graham re-enacts a scene from the history of rock music in which a musician throws potatoes at a gong in a sort of performance. In Graham's piece, vodka takes the place of the potatoes; a bottle of vodka is part of the installation. Rodney Graham is interested in these kinds of "processes of translation". Something that originated in literature becomes physical as it is rendered in another medium. My Only Novel Translated from the French (After William Beckford, Mark Twain) (2000), in which the French translation of an English text is translated back into English, is a direct example of this. The theme of the role of the artist is also explored in the monumental triptych The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007). In this work, Graham is a sleepwalking amateur painter who attempts to reproduce a large-format abstract painting. The scene in the light-box piece makes it looks like a film still. Graham plays on the art historical discourse of Modernity in which diverse directions are represented.

Finally Rodney Graham presents himself as a painter who, unlike in The Gifted Amateur, turns to the painting of the so-called Ãcole de Paris to produce abstractions in the style of that period.

The exhibition Through the Forest displays a long path that goes from the adaptation of literary models and the appropriation of moments in art history to impressive film works, and finally culminates in the most classical art medium, painting.
Publication: Rodney Graham. Through the Forest. Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010. With texts by Julian Heynen, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Friedrich Meschede, an interview with the artist by Nikola Dietrich and a biography by Grant Arnold.
The exhibition was organised by the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in collaboration with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

e-flux, 21. May 2010:

Rosemarie Trockel:
"Deliquescence Of The Mother"
8 May – 15 August 2010

Rosemarie Trockel, who was born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952, has been producing her stylistically heterogeneous works in a wide range of media since the 1970s. Her Œuvre, which has assumed an important and unique position at international level and encompasses drawings, two and three-dimensional picture and material collages, objects, installations, "knitting pictures", ceramics, videos, furniture, pieces of clothing, and books, cannot be reduced to a single artistic genre or style; its common denominator is the intensity of its content, which incorporates an equally wide-ranging network of associations and discourses, and extends from the premises of western philosophical, theological and scientific debate and various role models and symbols to the standardisations and canonical manifestations of art. All of this content is formulated from a precise and explicitly female perspective. However, the artist also outwits feminist platitudes and leads them ad absurdum – for example, in the "hot plate" works, which she has been producing since the late 1980s and which deliver a forceful blow to the minimalist aesthetic, and with her now trademark "knitting pictures", which present an ironic take on both the cliché of the agreeable, craft-based and mechanical form of art created by women and the traditional art-historical conventions.

However, Rosemarie Trockel's "female" perspective extends beyond a feminist gesture. Her works are the expressions of an author who – starting with the coding of her own individuation – distances herself from systems that impose both social and sexual identity and gender-related constraints.

This is repeatedly expressed in works concerning the polar opposites of the conscious and unconscious and the culturally formed and unformed, including, for example, the numerous works she has created with and about animals: i.e. the series of animal films produced between 1978 and 1990, the models and houses developed for various animal species since the late 1980s, the project Haus für Schweine und Menschen developed with Carsten Höller for documenta X 1997 and the bronze-cast "Gewohnheitstiere", including Gewohnheitstier 3 (Dackel) (1990), which contrast the unconcealed presentness of animals with the controlling awareness of humans.

"Deliquescence Of The Mother" is the title given by Rosemarie Trockel to her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which, following on from her Swiss debut at the Kunshalle Basel in 1988, an exhibition of works on paper in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 1991 and a presentation of her video works at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva in 1994, provides comprehensive insight into her Œuvre and features works and groups of works produced from the early 1980s on and works created specifically for the exhibition.

The exhibition is presented as a well appointed sequence of spaces, in which groups of works can be experienced in an ordered minimalist form: furniture and ceramic wall works, large-format monochrome knitting pictures, collages, videos and a re-interpreted extended installation S.h.e. (2000/2005/2010), in which the entire range of media used by the artist is combined in a dynamic cabinet. This retrospective "overview show" is presented in two oversized "display cases" built into the walls of the Kunsthalle, which the artist developed as a central installation for the exhibition: the cabinets contain signature works like the knitted trademarks, egg works, felted wool monsters, for example the armchair Atheismus (2007), and exemplars from the early group of plaster objects (Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II, 1982). Also presented are a very wide range of "hot plate" works, for example the cardboard hot-plate record player with a knitting needle stylus (Untitled, 1991), mouth sculptures (1989), Daddy's Striptease Room (1990), figures, body fragments and everyday objects. These refer to the "weighty" themes of the exhibition and set them in motion with lightness and ease through the interaction between the condensed "display cases" and the fluid spatial layout.

The eighth installation on the SEVEN SCREENS was realized by the internationally renowned film maker Harun Farocki. The SEVEN SCREENS, existing since 2006, are a unique platform for digital art works in Munich's public space. For his project Farocki created a site specific work that reacts to the 'spectacle expectation' that is often associated with LED screens as a medium.

Umgiessen (Re-pouring) refers to Tomas Schmit's performance, 'Zyklus für Wassereimer (oder Flaschen)' (Cycle for Water Buckets [or Bottles]), which he performed on December 18, 1963 in Amsterdam. The Fluxus artist knelt on the floor in a circle of empty milk bottles and poured water from one bottle into the next until all the water had spilled or evaporated. "The action," claimed Farocki, "evaded symbolism ... it had no vital quality. It was akin to a Beckett play in the simplicity of its conclusiveness. Despite the uniformity of the event, there was a development; the anti-action found an end on its own initiative."

Harun Farocki transformed the ritual action into a twenty-minute long, unedited film, translated for the spatial arrangement of the stele. Each stele is assigned to a bottle. Farocki let the pouring be done by a robot, whose arm wanders through the expanded pictorial space, executing the unspectacular act of re-pouring.

Born in 1944 in Novy Jicin (Czech Republic). 1966 – 1968 studies at the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (West). 1974 – 1984 author and editor of the magazine Filmkritik, Munich. 1998 – 1999 Speaking about Godard / Von Godard sprechen, New York / Berlin (a collaboration with Kaja Silverman); 1993 – 1999 visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1966 Farocki has made more than 100 productions for television and cinema, including children's television programs, documentaries, essay films and narrative films; since 1996 the subject of many group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, most recently in 2009 at the Jeu de Paume, Paris and Museum Ludwig, Cologne; participation in 2007 in documenta 12. 2004 – 2006 visiting professor, since 2006 full professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste, Vienna.

The Kewenig Galerie is pleased to present paintings from the cycle The Canon, by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, and to document the artist's project for Baldeney Lake in Essen within the context of the Cultural Capital RUHR.2010.

As the author of The Canon, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov name the fictitious artist, Charles Rosenthal. Born in Moscow in 1898, Rosenthal emigrated to Paris in 1922, where he died in 1933, Ilya Kabakov's year of birth. Rosenthal's large, white-grounded canvases are subdivided by a grid of lines into uniform rectangles in portrait format. Like many artists, he seems to work with the square grid to compose his paintings, a method used to make large paintings according to small sketches. The surface of the painting remains largely white; in each one only one field of the grid, or sometimes two, is filled with seemingly impressionist landscapes or with social-realist figurative scenes. Whether in the case of the Canon scenes, it is merely a matter of details in a grid that still has to be filled out, remains an open question. Only the images in which more than one of the fields is filled in a painterly way allow the conclusion to be drawn, because of the congruent scale and subject, that also the remaining white fields still had to be filled. According to Kabakov, with the greater distance from Russia, it became increasingly difficult for Rosenthal to fill in the white patches of his paintings.

The imaginary biography of Rosenthal includes stays in 1920s Paris and allows various artistic influences to be surmised. It enables Ilya and Emilia Kabakov to dip into an artistic past which they themselves no longer experienced due to their later birth. In a mixture of nostalgia and distance, in Rosenthal's paintings, Russian art traditions from Malevich's realistic beginnings through to constructivism are revived, and experiences of exile of an artist emigrated to western Europe intermingle. The hallmark of realist painting widespread in the Soviet Union of the 1920s was a light background as a sign of hope and a positive new dawn after the revolution. In contrast to Rosenthal, Ilya Kabakov grew up in the Soviet Union at a time when there was nothing hopeful in the socialist system, but rather a prevailing atmosphere of oppression and pessimism. Perhaps for this reason he inverts the positive signs by defining the light background in the Canon cycle as emptiness.

In the basement of the gallery, a model and films about Kabakov's Ruhr Atoll project for Baldeney Lake in Essen are presented which is emerging within the context of the Cultural Capital RUHR.2010. Eight artists and artist couples have been invited by the curator, Norbert Bauer, to make temporary island projects for Baldeney Lake and the Ruhr in perambulating dimensions ranging from 150 to 300 sq. m. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's Project for the Protection of Natural Resources shows a subtle ensemble on scientific investigations of water. Human intervention into nature and the method of investigation are completely adapted to contemporary demands of ecological sustainability, albeit only ironically and with tongue in cheek. With rattles and squeaks, and employing numerous machines and pumps from the post-Soviet region â a "stamped-out piece of my Russian homeland" â on the Kabakovian island, nothing is achieved other than pumping the water of Baldeney Lake from the lef t to the right. The Ruhr Atoll in Essen will open at the same time as the gallery exhibition and can be viewed during the summer by boat.

e-flux, 21. April 2010:

Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall
6 May – 13 June 2010
In collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne
http://www.bxb.ch/kunsthalle/

In August 1946 Marcel Duchamp spent a few days at the Bellevue Hotel near Chexbres (today, Le Baron Tavernier). During his stay he discovered the Forestay waterfall. There was never a research, why the artist chose this waterfall and not another one to become the starting point and eventually the landscape of his famous final masterpiece: "Etant donnés: 1Â° la chute d'eau, 2Â° le gaz d'éclairage" (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). We will answer this question with a multidisciplinary event. We hope you will join us on this unique occasion.

"Rinsed with mercury / Throughout to this bespattered / Fruit of reflection, rife / With... distortion / (Each other, clouds and trees). What made a mirror flout its flat convention? / Surfacing as a solid... / And what was the sensation / When stars alone like bees / Crawled numbly over it?..."

The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill

White Cube Mason's Yard is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Cerith Wyn Evans. Taking its title from a song by Steely Dan, 'Everyone's Gone To The Movies' (1975), Wyn Evans has created two major installations that transform the gallery spaces, engaging the viewer through the interaction of light, sound and reflection.

Suspended in the ground floor gallery is C=O=N=S=T=E=L=L=A=T=I=O=N (I call your image to mind) a polyphonic sound mobile adapted from a series of 'audio spotlights' by the American holosonic inventor Joseph Pompei. Suspended in tiers, sixteen mirrored discs gently rotate in mid-air, transmitting directional, ultra-sonic beams of sound. This consists of a multi-layered soundtrack or sound collage created by Wyn Evans using various audio sources amongst which are his own piano arrangements and field recordings gathered by the Lovell radio telescope in Jodrell Bank. These constantly shifting bursts of audio disorientate the viewer as the polished 'mirror-speakers' reflect and deflect the sound off the surrounding walls, creating a phenomenological experience that can neither be shared nor repeated. In the stairwell, Wyn Evans has placed a white neon sculpture titled Subtitle, which can be read when reflected on the adjacent glass window, interrupting the view to ou tside. The neon spells out the phrase 'Thoughts unsaid now forgotten...', occasioning a cognitive slippage whilst, at the same time prompting us to recollect.

In the lower ground floor space Wyn Evans has created a spectacular installation of light columns entitled S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ('Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive's overspill...') that references the former electricity sub-station which stood on the site now occupied by the gallery. This soaring infrastructure consists of seven columns that reach over five metres high, and which are built out of drums of tubular light bulbs, stacked in varying lengths and diameters. The layout, while following no apparent guiding rule creates its own order, intuitively informed by principles of spatial balance that the artist has encountered in Japanese rock gardens, galactic alignment and site groupings of stars in astrophotography. Yet here, the transparency of these vertiginous flutes, defined by flecked-wire filaments that run through their centre, appear to hide nothing. Intermittently the columns surge to a blinding brightness, then gradually f ade back down to black, channeling an incandescent sense of breath and ethereality.

In the small adjoining gallery Wyn Evans has hung a series of twenty-two framed works on paper, titled F=R=E=S=H=W=I=D=O=W, that references a poem by Stephane Mallarmé titled 'Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard' (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), which was published posthumously in 1914. The poem was reprinted in 1969 by Marcel Broodthaers who described it as an 'image' after having blocked out the various typefaces and arrangement of words using black bars. Wyn Evans takes this process a step further by framing each page of the poem, both recto and verso, like a series of intervals, glazed on both sides. Every line of the poem has now been cut away leaving a composition of interstitial gaps on the gallery wall – framing the materiality of the already framed 'white cube'.

A fully illustrated catalogue, including an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, will accompany the exhibition.

Cerith Wyn Evans lives and works in London. In 2003, he represented Wales in the 50th Venice Biennale and has participated in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (2005), Yokohama Triennale (2008) and will be in the forthcoming Aichi Triennale this summer (2010). Last year, he collaborated with Florian Hecker and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary on 'No night No day' at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). He also collaborated with Throbbing Gristle on a major visual and audio installation titled A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N which was exhibited at both the Yokohama Triennale and the Tramway, Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Graz (2005), Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris (2006), MUSAC, Leon (2008), Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2009) and Tramway, Glasgow (2009).

e-flux, 16. April 2010:

LIAM GILLICK
One long walk... Two short piers...
1 April – 8 August 2010

Liam Gillick was born in England in 1964. Since the early 1990's he has been among the leading representatives of the continuing development of conceptual art. In 2009 he was chosen to design the German Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany has dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to Liam Gillick. This is the first show of its kind, not only in Germany but also internationally. About 60 works from two decades will be on display. The development of his oeuvre will be shown according to groups of works and themes from the late 1980's to his contribution for the German Pavilion in 2009.

The work of this artist, who lives in New York and London, cannot be allocated to any specific artistic media: he is at one and the same time, an object maker, painter, composer, curator and critic. Furthermore, Gillick can boast of an extensive list of publications which includes essays, critiques, fictional texts and theatre-related scenarios.

The show consists of five parts. It begins with an extensive text - work which slices diagonally through the exhibition area like a wedge. The German and English wall text consists of titles of works which were created between 1990 and 2004 with different media ranging from small works on paper to large sculptures.

Two further halls offer a retrospective insight. One focuses on the 1990's while the other provides insights into the development of Gillick's works after the year 2000.

For the artist, the 1990's were defined by developing central topics and strategies, formulating a specific aesthetic approach and direction, and finding a balance and mutual interactions between his artworks and the literary and theoretical texts that he produced at the same time. Selected works from the extensive groups McNamara Papers (1992-1995), Erasmus and Ibuka! Realisations (1994-1996) and The What If? Scenarios (1996-1998) enable the viewer to explore Gillick's early artistic path.

At the end of the 1990's Liam Gillick started producing works that can be summarised under the title Discussion Island, Big Conference Center. In many ways, the artworks come across as places which encourage discussion, in other words, a debate about the main questions in our society. Gillick created artworks as places for conversations, for discussions on the organisation of our society but also as places for the planning of future social model, so literary and political utopian visions appear as a basis for reflection and as failed attempts at creating a different society in the future.

Gillick developed artworks on the basis of this exploration of social utopias which also feature in his text Literally No Place, 2002.

The second hall comprises examples of works from the years after 2000 which show this development. In the middle of the last decade the artist concerned himself with the subject of a deserted factory under the heading Construccion de Uno (2004). After the plant had closed down, the workers returned and tried to find a new way to produce and to organise work. Examples from this group, which are based on the artist's utopian model, conclude the show. Volvo Bar (2008), one of two extensive installations, also belongs in this context. It was first shown in 2008 in the Munich Kunstverein and served as a setting for a short scenario in 8 acts by the artist.

The exhibition brings Gillick's work for the German Pavilion into connection with his whole oeuvre. The installation How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks (2009) functions as the "projection" of a kitchen, a place for communication, conversation and discussion. Although planned from top to bottom, internationally standardised and serially produced, this private and familiar area allows for the freedom it offers to exist in a socially determined, standardised context. The analysis of the state of society never ends, not even in this unspectacular place where everyday life is lived.

With more than 350 illustrations, the exhibition catalogue presents a first overview of Liam Gillick's complex work. The main focus is on the last ten years. A series of significant exhibitions, projects, sculptures and site-specific, short-term interventions illustrate the development of an artistic approach which inspires basic questions regarding the possibilities and function of art in our social reality. This visual foray is supplemented by Liam Gillick's own notes, thought fragments and comments which to a large extent have been published for the first time.

Essays by Isabelle Moffat and Nicolas Bourriaud focus on central aspects of Gillick's work which have often been the topic of controversial discussions.

Art-Agenda, 26. March 2010:

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov at Sprovieri

Sprovieri Gallery is delighted to present The Flying Paintings, a new series of paintings by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

The Kabakovs are Russia's foremost living artists. In 2008 they launched the Garage Centre for contemporary art in Moscow, exhibiting their total installations for the first time in twenty years since they left the country, and their exhibition Incident at the Museum and Other Installations at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in 2004 was the first exhibition by living Russian artists ever to be held there.

Ilya Kabakov has written of "the aura which comes from our past" as being "what stops us from sinking into oblivion, and what we call our culture, our interior world." The 'interior world' of which he writes is frequently referred to in their works with their use of the colour white; as such they follow in a tradition of Russian artists and writers who have made a link between white and an ideal spiritual state, most famously Kasimir Malevich, who used it in his 1918 painting White on White to represent a state of pure feeling and perception. The Kabakov's work is also closely connected with the notion of utopia (having spent much of their lives living within what was to become the failed soviet utopia), exploring whether it has (or can) ever actually exist, without loosing their optimism in its potential.

Each work in The Flying Paintings depicts one or more idealised scenes that float within the white space of the canvas: one's gaze transcends the actual scenes depicted, as if they are a dream or half recalled memory. While some of the scenes are specifically Russian (showing, for instance, women in traditional dress) for the whole they are universal. Throughout the series the process of reading and interpreting is obstructed by the painting technique itself: sometimes they are depicted as if seen from a sharp angle, tilting or lying across the canvas and at times they disappear altogether off the edge of the canvas. Painted in the Impressionist manner, the works invite the viewer to compensate for the missing details with their own input, though the lurid colours and stylised outlines give the scenes a more hallucinatory and claustrophobic atmosphere than the naturalistic depictions of landscape of the Impressionist painters. Even though posited within the 'ideal' and interior space of the imagination, the experience of reading and interpreting the works is stunted, their overriding effect more atmospheric than factual. One's response is to read each scene more as a site of a failed utopia than a living real and to question whether it was the 'ideal' and 'supreme' white space of contemplation that failed to communicate to contents of the works, or the viewer's fantasy that was flawed from the outset.

Now based in America, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov collaborate on environments that fuse elements of the everyday with those of the conceptual. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, it still attains a universal significance. Since the early 1990s they have collaborated to make complex installations that combine references to history, art, literature and philosophy. Much of their work has revolved around the creation of fictional characters and elaborate situations, and an interest in storytelling and fantasy underpins their art. Ilya Kabakov coined the term 'total installation' to describe these all-encompassing environments, in which viewers find themselves completely absorbed by the atmosphere of the work. Whilst best known for their large scale and all encompassing installations, Ilya Kabakov has painted throughout his career, working frequently in series.

Their work is included in the collections of most of the world's major museums, including MoMA in New York, Tate Modern in London and The Pompidou in Paris, and has been shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Documenta IX, at the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg among others. In 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale with their installation The Red Pavilion. The Kabakovs have also completed many important public commissions throughout Europe and have received a number of honours and awards, including the medal of friendship from the Russian President in 2009, the Praemium Imperiale in 2008, the Oscar Kokoschka Preis, Vienna, in 2002, and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, in 1995. The Kabakovs live and work in Long Island, USA.

In his film, dated 2006, Martin Creed films the physcial act of vomitting, in a manner that most viewers might find repulsive. A frequently asked question at the numerous exhibitions where Creeds video was shown might thus be: »Is this art?«. The Turner-Prize-Winner provokes the audience in a manner, which at least since 1969 has reoccured frequently. More than 40 years later Martin Creed's work isn't merely screened at smaller film- and artfestivals, but intentionally shown at international venues and offered for sale by notable galleries at international artfairs. Martin Creed serves the market with an undeniable irony.

As the opening of a year-long programme of predominantly experimental film works and video installations at mother's tankstation, we are honoured to present Michael Snow's canonical 1982 conceptual cinematic work, So Is This.

The strategies Snow employs in this probing, but humour-laden, acknowledged masterpiece are simultaneously simple yet engagingly complex. Ostensibly, 'So Is This' is a forty-three minute long, silent film work, to be viewed from beginning to end, constructed solely from intertitles: Snow laboriously shot text, in the form of single, short 'light' words, in negative, on celluloid in temporal sequence (now transferred to DVD). This process allows the viewer to mentally cement the 'narrator's' words together to construct sentences and paragraphs. The effect - akin to controlled, depicted thought - is nothing short of mesmeric, and has been politely described by the long-time film critic of The Village Voice; J. Hoberman, as defamiliarizing '...both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into theoretical debate...'. Although the exploration of film and writing, 'image' and text was an important area of investigation in a number of conceptual works throughout the 70s and 80s, Snow's agenda in 'So Is This' was, perhaps, prompted as much by the censors increasing interest in his work as its art-world chronology. Ultimately, it is the artist's (on-going) and the work's (particularized) concerns with the freedom of opinion and speech that makes this work timeless and eternally relevant.

The strange social process of reading words on moving celluloid frames in a populated theatre is self-evidently distinct from the self-regulated steady, private reading of words on the page and should perhaps carry a health warning; this film may be especially unsatisfying for those who dislike having others read over their shoulders (no audience rage, please). There is rather, an odd satisfaction in the shared experience, which amplifies the humour, the message, and the conspiratorial nature of an intimacy simultaneously imparted. In an ever-noisier world, there is also a compelling disparity between the silence of the work and the insistently dominant and controlling presence of the 'narrator', who carefully draws a distinction, in the third-person party, from the 'author'. Through the facade of narrator the real power of 'the author', Snow, concentrates special attention on the small words (as the title indicates), which cradle the meaning of more complex sentences. The word – again as indicated by the title – most emphasized is 'this', which Snow beautifully describes as 'the most present tense word there is'. The individual words that make up the frames are all set to the same margins. The result being, that small words are more emphasized, by dint of taking up a larger portion of the screen, while the longer ones are reduced in scale and impact (and often speed) to fit the margins. The duration of each word on the screen varies greatly, as does the darkness in the pauses between the words. This rhythmic pacing of words and darkness consciously moves the viewer/reader between humour and infuriation. Unlike other textual forms, where you can scan through sentences and paragraphs to make meaning, 'So Is This' only allows the audience to read at a pace strictly controlled by the filmmaker, whereby Snow underscores that all information is ultimately a carefully controlled construct.

The words of 'So Is This' are typeset in Helvetica font – a standard sans-serif style heavily utilised during the seventies and eighties, and also employed by Kruger and Holzer. However, rather than the adoption of a clean, graphic-studio appearance, Snow focuses in upon the imperfections characteristic to manual typesetting, stressing the humanized presences of the silent disembodied voice/s of the narrator/author. The letterings are sometimes cracked, or slightly fraying at the edges. Similarly, Snow used out-of-date colour film stock to make this 'black and white' film, which the viewer soon realizes is not black and white at all, but a range of dark and light colours. Some words have a flicker effect, and at times the 'white' text bleeds into a yellow tone, while the 'black' background moves toward a dark green. Although minimal in its use of 'imagery', 'So Is This' maintains a particular beauty in the simplicity of shapes and colours – the serendipitously unpredictable nature of out-of-date film – wherein the film-maker becomes almost a formalist painter in light. It also may seem odd to discuss aesthetic agendas of pattern, rhythm and colour in relation to such a theorized conceptual work like 'So is This', but Snow clearly pays indulgent attention to such details, and it is perhaps his masterful deployment of such, to conceptual ends, that adds to the work's insistent longevity.

Andrea Fraser's performances, video pieces and installations make her one of the most important representatives of institutional criticism. In her work she selects various aspects of the art industry and analyses them from a social, institutional and economic perspective. Fraser became well-known in the mid-1980s for her »gallery talks«, in which she analysed the presentation formats, hierarchies and exclusion mechanisms that prevail in art institutions. Her site-specific performances took the form of humorous, but also serious or pseudo-scientific tours through museums, with Fraser assuming the alter ego of a stereotypical museum docent. The script was based on excerpts from documentations found in the museum archive or psychoanalytical and sociological sources. The co-dependence of prominent artists and their patrons, the scope of media coverage on art events and the exhibition visitors' conditioned behaviour are just some of the themes she addresses in her performances and video installations.

The PacMan Trilogy, a three-part schematization of selected human dynamics:

I. Unite (2005) This anti-pack-mentality deprogrammer models the idealized case in which the number of originating members of the pack is ? nite and stipulated, and therefore can diminish progressively to zero. In reality, new recruits to the pack are continually being procreated, programmed and inducted, as unsuitable members are rooted out, thus continually replenishing pack membership in an unlimited series.

II. The Spurious Life-Death Distinction (2006) The life-death distinction depends on outdated assumptions about consciousness as equivalent to sentience. But speculative physics and Vedanta concur in equating consciousness with energy. Since energy is conserved, consciousness is also conserved throughout the cycle of growth and decay. Consciousness does not die; it merely undergoes transformation of form.

III. Bait-and-Switch (2008) A research technique for measuring a subject's dependency on an object, substance, behavior, person, relationship, group, institution, belief, goal, hope, or fantasy. (1) A quantity of it large enough to stimulate pleasure but small enough to stimulate a desire for more is administered; (2) The subject is enticed to hunt for more; (3) It is then withdrawn, and the persistence of the subject's hunting behavior in its absence is measured. Here, this dynamic is simplified into a continuously recycling two-person minuet.

Primary Information & Donlon Books is pleased to invite you to the book launch of Rock/Music Writings, the first English language collection devoted entirely to Dan Graham's writings on music.

Having initially appeared in small journals like Extensions, magazines such as Fusion of REALLIFE, or the artist's catalogues the publication titled Rock/Music Writings covers Graham's most prolific period of writing on music and its relation to popular and visual culture: the late 60s to the late 80s. Most of these essays are out of print or available here for the first time in anthologized form.

While Dan Graham is known widely for visual art, he began writing about Rock n Roll in the late 60s and remains an active writer on music and popular culture, both of which remain major tenants of his work. In the late 70s, Graham became very influential to the now infamous New York no wave scene through his friendships with Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, and Kim Gordon, to name but a few. Through this influence, Graham became a touchstone for many musicians, and he was responsible for helping form and inspire many bands of that era, among them the Theoretical Girls (which he original named "Girls That Do Theory") and Sonic Youth.

Graham gave back to this community with his seminal video and essay Rock My Religion, as well as New Wave Rock and the Feminine, and Punk as Propaganda. Other works on punk rock included in the book are The End of Liberalism, McLaren's Children, Untitled, and Artist as Producer. Dan Graham, based in New York, has exhibited widely since the 1960s, beginning with conceptual magazine inserts and moving towards performance, video and architecture. A survey of Graham's work, Dan Graham: Beyond, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition originated at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and is traveling to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the Fall.

James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff are the founders of Primary Information, a non-profit organization based in New York. Primary Information publishes artists books, artists writings, out-of-print publications, editions and web resources.

For the first time and marking UBERMORGEN.COM 's 10-year anniversary, a critical examination of the complete body of work of the artist duo lizvlx and Hans Bernhard is presented in the form of a 200 page book, which includes more than 200 color pictures.

A highly varied assortment of critics, curators, and artists reflect on UBERMORGEN.COM's border crossings in the channels of global mass media and on their radical actions above the abyss of the international art scene. It is this conglomerate of conceptual art, software art, fine art, media hacking, net.art and media actionism that makes UBERMORGEN.COM the hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk that stands out in Europe's media art avant-garde.

The project section of the catalogue features exemplary projects such as [V]ote-Auction, the Generator Tetralogy, the Psych|OS cycle and the EKMRZ Trilogy: GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime and The Sound of eBay.

The Monograph is a joint effort from three solo exhibitions held at the Basler Forum für Neue Medien [plug.in] (2005), at HMKV - Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund (2006) and at Overgaden Contemporary Art Institute Copenhagen (2006).

Stephan Willat »In and Out The Underworld', a project developed and realized specially for the European Kunsthalle c/o Ebertplatz, Cologne. 11. 7. – 6. 9. 2009

»In And Out The Underworld' is conceived as a journey through the passage or »underworld' of Ebertplatz – as a transition from one reality to another, from the conscious to the unconscious, from the possibility of a »counter-consciousness' to the normality of the surrounding city.

Ebertplatz and its 1970's design – which Willats sees as inhabiting an »institutional determinism' – is both site of production and exhibition space for his film, sound and text-based installation. As is the case with many modern visions, the built environment of the Ebertplatz is modified through many different kinds of use. Layered onto the concrete are the signs and messages of a counter consciousness of values created and informed by those people who are shaping the Ebertplatz's character in their own unique way. Willats' recordings of discarded objects also signify some of those behaviours that have expressed a counter consciousness.

In Stephen Willats' idea, it is the potential of society, of an encounter with someone else, that is the social dynamic of this actual public space. With this in mind, he invited a group of people that live or work near the Ebertplatz to participate in an event on 18th April 2009 using a variety of media to create and record multiple channels of experiences. Participants enter or leave the square in pairs – two people being seen as the basic unit of any network or any society – meeting two other people in the middle of the passage. In the process, their identities and relationships to each other are viewed by others as being constantly changed, thus influencing perception and the way they see themselves: a filmic staging of external and self-perception, processes of instant imposition, shifting identities, interaction and the public sphere.

Born 1943 in London, Stephen Willats is one of the British art scene's most influential figures. Willats, who created numerous exhibitions both at home and abroad has developed community based projects and social strategies in art starting in the early 1960s and has also published 'Control Magazine' since 1965.

Stephen Willats' exhibition »In And Out The Underworld' takes place within the project »European Kunsthalle c/o Ebertplatz' presenting international and Cologne based artists since summer 2008 at the Ebertplatz in Cologne within the outdoor temporary kunsthalle designed by Dorit Margreiter who currently represents Austria at the 2009 Venice Biennial.

Catriona Jeffries Gallery is honoured to announce that Ian Wallace is the recipient of the 2009 Molson Prize for the Arts, recognizing his outstanding lifetime achievements and ongoing contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

The 2009 Molson Prize for the Arts will be awarded to Ian Wallace in September 2009 in Vancouver. Catriona Jeffries Gallery will concurrently be opening a solo exhibition of Ian Wallace in September, the second component of an investigation into the historical lineages of Wallace's practice since 1967. Whereas the former exhibition in 2007 explored the evolution of the monochrome, this forthcoming exhibition will track the narrative structures Wallace utlizied through film and photograhy in the 1970s.

The Molson Prize for the Arts is awarded annually to distinguished Canadians, one in the arts and the other in the social sciences and humanities. The Molson Prizes encourage Canadians honoured with this distinction to continue contributing to the cultural and intellectual heritage of Canada. The Canada Council selects the winners and administers the awards in conjunction with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Mark Dion (*1961 in New Bedford, lives in New York and Pennsylvania) builds six hunting stands in Neumünster, six quite different raised hides referring to six types of hunters or hunting situations. There are the Kennel and The Ruin, a derelict stand; one hide unmistakably belongs to The Slob, another to The Glutton, yet another to the Dandy-Rococo; The Librarian, finally, points to a scholarly type of hunter. The artist uses not only the regular exhibition space, but also the entire park in Neumünster – as a special feature, the hunting room of Herbert Gerisch, the founder, is included in the exhibition. The 'private' thus becomes 'public' as Dion converts the collection of a hunter into the installation of an artist.

Mark Dion, who lives in New York and Pennsylvania, belongs to the artists who are classificationists. He is interested in sociohistorical analyses and works with natural scientists and art institutions either to describe natural history like an alchemist as a typology of human cultural volition, or – where necessary and with the occasional irony – to invent it. The aesthetic juxtaposition of art and other collector's items the artist develops to express such a critical world view is as elaborated und subtle as in the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities; from today's perspective, the unfamiliar combination provokes inquisitiveness and creates powerful and sometimes brutal images.

Mark Dion's artistic concept aims at seriality and calls on the time-honoured scientific tradition of the encyclopaedia. But the artist is a psychologist as well who encourages the visitors to think about what type of person they are. After all, every human being is a hunter, and Mark Dion derives a psychology or even an archetypology of hunting. The comprehensive exhibition 'Concerning Hunting/ Über die Jagd' is realised in co-operation with Kunstraum Dornbrin, Aarhus Kunstbygning, Galleria Civica di Modena and Kunsthalle Krems. In Germany, it will only be shown in Neumünster, where it gets a special twist by the addition, among other things, of Kennel, the new, extravagant hunting stand with an integrated doghouse for 'Baron', the founder's hound.

The artistic examination of the topic »nature' is a leitmotif in the oeuvre of this exceptional artist. His works investigate the organising principles of the creaturely and turn the viewer into a collector, an explorer and an adventurer. Seemingly playful, without nostalgia and romance, Mark Dion pins down subtle cultural differences: The Dandy-Rococo with his cut glass and silver plate, with his hunting horn and numerous trophies refers to the age-old alliance between hunting and aristocracy and thus to the cultural act that precedes the defeat of the demonic forces of nature. In The Glutton, the paradisiac abundance has degenerated into excess. The hunting stand is awash with sausages, meat, bones, cigarettes, glasses and plates. Even though opulence and illusion are integral parts of the iconography of hunting, uninhibited consumption leads to decline – or rather to The Ruin, the dilapidated hide. Similarly, The Slob leaves behind empty casings, used targets, beer and liquor bottles, cigarette stubs, half-eaten tins and Playboy magazines, mimicking machismo and thus becoming the hunted one himself.

The overlapping of fiction and reality, of art and documentation is the hallmark of Mark Dion's artistic strategy. With the alterations in the Gerisch-Stiftung he plans for the exhibition 'Concerning Hunting', he continues his series of artistic interventions in found situations that analyse the limits of nature and culture, of science and museal documentation. Important references are the concepts the American artist has developed e. g. for the 'Natuurhistorisch Museum Masstricht', the 'Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature' in Paris and the 'ChÃ¢teau de Chambord' in the Loire region. The exhibition of the internationally acclaimed artist is a special contribution to the lead topic of the sculpture park, a question that was formulated by Dr. Martin Henatsch, the artistic director, to examine culturally shaped perceptions of nature as reflected in art: 'Where is Arcadia today?' This concept demands a 'site-specific' curating that perfectly matches Mark Dion's strategy.

In an interview (Kunstforum International, 2001), the artist described his approach as »location sensitive'. Consequently, he includes not only the previously used exhibition space in the Villa Wachholtz and the Gerisch-Galerie in Neumünster in his concept, but also the private hunting room of the founder. Among other things, Mark Dion designed six fictitious, stereotypical hunter costumes from different periods and continents to complement the existing interior decoration: The American Frontiersman, the African Great White Safari Hunter, the Fox Chaser with top-hat and hunting horn, the European Countryside Hunter with rubber boots, the prehistoric Caveman and the contemporary North American Bow Hunter. In combination with the Massai collection Herbert Gerisch brought home from the hunt, found reality and artistic imagination merge into an almost unanalysable synthesis.

At the same time, Mark Dion is an expert, cross-cultural moderator who counter questions inquiries while indulging intellectual speculation: Isn't there an essential connection between the hunt for and the collection of trophies, art, beautiful moments or special locations? Isn't a leader implicitly a hunter of power? Isn't true power something every individual has to chase and capture for himself? Mark Dion subtly uncovers the cultures of hunting but takes care not to denounce the urge to hunt that is deeply rooted in human nature. He moots, intensifies and dramatises the usual scenarios and finally warns the viewers that the human species always bears the potential for self-destruction. Mark Dion himself describes his disposition as 'dark sensitivity': 'I don't believe that things will improve. Even though the world won't suffer a devastating catastrophe, it will decline into a less and less interesting place with a continually decreasing biological and cultural diversity. In this sense, my works tend to appear as macabre and pessimistic.' However, the sculptural, forward-looking transformation of this disposition into Mark Dion's singular visual language turns the exhibition into a fascinating experience.

Announcing the establishment of The Július Koller Society and its inaugural public activity, the conference Július Koller, U.F.O.-naut?

The Július Koller Society – občianske zdruÅ¾enie Pribinova 25 SK-811 02 Bratislava Slovak Republic sjk@sjk.sk www.sjk.sk The founding committee of The Július Koller Society (SJK) is pleased to announce its public registration as a civic association based in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. The SJK is founded in memory of the artist Július Koller (1938 – 2007), whose oeuvre, in its stringency, obsession and peculiarity, is one of the most idiosyncratic and consistent in European visual arts since the 1960s.

This first international conference on the oeuvre of Július Koller aims to discover new methodological and theoretical prospects for interpreting and presenting the artist's practice, the vast extent, comprehensive approach and conceptual rigour of which is becoming increasingly evident. This and the topicality of Koller's artistic method - his strategy of using real objects, the real world, everyday life as a given program for an aesthetic operation, an endless aesthetic displacement intended to put an end to aesthetics - are subjects of analysis and debate between local and international scholars. The conference provides new opportunities to meet and hear from Koller's most important and influential contemporaries as well as younger artists from both Eastern and Western Europe, thus enabling a reappraisal of the influence of Koller's work on post-conceptual tendencies in contemporary art. During the conference, the Slovak National Gallery and the Július Koller Society present a research exhibition of Koller's works from their collections.

The conference lays the groundwork for a catalogue raisonné and a large monographic exhibition at the Slovak National Gallery, scheduled for spring 2010, and followed by an international tour through major museums and art institutions.

Mission: The Július Koller Society (SJK) is a non-profit association of citizens whose aim is to preserve, research, enrich and relate to the public the artistic heritage of Július Koller. A collection site and archive of the artist's work, a research and study centre, as well as a place for public debate and reflection, the SJK organizes domestic and international projects and activities in the areas of fine arts, art history, visual studies and cultural theory. It furthermore encourages the exchange of ideas and information in these fields, challenging the canons, geographies and master narratives of established art histories. Opposed to a reduction of arts and culture to their economic, populist or merely spectacular aspects, one main focus of the SJK is to research and highlight the specific conditions and histories of anti-canonical, peripheral and hitherto marginalized artistic practices.

Július Koller, U.F.O.-naut ? As its first public activity, The Július Koller Society, in collaboration with the Slovak National Gallery, is proud to present Július Koller, U.F.O.-naut?, the first international conference on the oeuvre of Július Koller.

The history of moving image seems to have 'seriously' diverted from its canonical route ever since the launch of YouTube, in 2005, the website which made possible for anyone who could use a computer to post a video that millions of people could watch within a few minutes. More effectively than ever before, amateur videos, music videos, footages of films, commercials and news segments as well as artists' videos (in lesser numbers) mingle together, in a random way, free of any short of predetermined hierarchy or system.

Does amateur culture have undervalued artistic expertise? Some would argue that this is true; however, it is neither a major concern nor a pragmatic threat. During the last decades, there have been a lot of debates about expertise versus amateurism or around the idea that everyone is an artist, etc, that it would be redundant to renegotiate these notions anew. Maybe it is more interesting to focus on the gaps and the relations between the systems of the art market and a more open mass culture market, to find some answers, which will not be fixed in anyway. Even if artists, in some cases, are reluctant to upload their works in there (at least up to now) due to reproduction and copyright issues, they still seem to frequent YouTube for inspiration, collecting information, socializing, communication, activism or entertainment, among other reasons! Active use of YouTube is a short of curating, where different 'playlists' of people are the exhibitions and 'tagging' is a process of a random archiving.

In a time that invitations for YouTube-exchange private gatherings become regular, seemed to make lots of sense to explore what YouTube means to a specific intellectual community, by asking a number of artists to select videos already exciting in YouTube and create their own playlists. The idea was to form a YouTube channel, a short of a paradoxical archive, or an emission in an independent media (such as YouTube) which includes all these playlists, each under the name of the artist-selector. In that plot, the uploader or the broadcaster becomes the artist, the artist becomes the curator or the collector, and the viewers exceed by far the number that can be contained into a normal screening room, since the channel is to be watched in a black cube setting and online at the same time.

Through the combination of this specific set of artists -as selectors- the aim remains always to come up with an anthology of different voices existing within the YouTube context. Perhaps, by watching this channel one could come across the notions of political, private, humor, narcissism, pop and DIY culture and distribution, -among others- as they result from various personal accounts in YouTube today. Launched at Pulse, Contemporay Art Fair NY, 5th March 2009

The California variant of Conceptual Art began in San Diego in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Separate from and in addition to John Baldessari's historic »National City« work, there was at about the same time a sudden influx of scholars, artists and students to the La Jolla campus of the University of California that effectively remade that once sleepy outpost into a new cultural center. San Diego and the Origins of Conceptual Art in California is a study of that moment. Participating artists include: David Antin, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Helen and Newton Harrison, Fred Lonidier, Allan Kaprow, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Phel Steinmetz

On Wednesday February 4 at Studio Trisorio in Rome and Friday February 6 at Studio Trisorio in Naples at 7.00 p.m. for the first time in Italy the video works of the English artists John Wood and Paul Harrison will be presented. The two artists have worked together in the medium of video since 1993. They realize actions in which the human body and every day objects are used as instruments to explore space and to prove the rule of action and reaction. Their language is characterized by a minimalist as well as conceptual and ironic approach.

Harrison and Wood are often protagonists in their videos: they inhabit the space of the 'white cube' interacting with simple objects on neutral backgrounds, creating anecdotic situations, compressed in few minutes. Actions and situations – as well as space – are always strictly stylized. The works are derived from schematic diagrams, inviting the observer to a 'reality show' in which the artists explore their capacity to take risks. Their research reflects their interest in performance, sculpture and architecture.

John Wood and Paul Harrison have recently exhibited at MOMA, NY; CCA Wattis in San Francisco, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. And are currently preparing for solo shows at IKON, UK, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, USA and The High Museum, Atlanta, USA.

Their works are in public and private collections including Tate, London, Museum of Modern Art New York, Government Art Collection and Arts Council Collection, London

Gallery Studio Trisorio interviewed John Wood and Paul Harrison on their work: Studio Trisorio: How did you start to collaborate, what was the first impulse? In which way do you work together on the same project?

John Wood & Paul Harrison: We first met in the late 1980's at Art College, but didn't start to work together until we met again several years later. We discovered that, even though our personalities are very different, we share a lot of the same interests and most importantly we can spend a lot of time together without getting on each others nerves. At first we both worked equally on all aspects of the collaboration. But more recently, even though the ideas for final pieces are shared, we have more specific roles. For example, John could be in the studio preparing to shoot a new video whilst I may be traveling to install a show. This is largely down to a much busier schedule than when we first started out.

S.T.: Which is the process of your creations, how do you plan it?

J. W. & P.H.: Most of the videos begin as a series of drawings for instance with 'notebook' (which is being shown in Naples) there are 101 short sections, we started with about 300 drawings which were then edited down to the final selection. Most of the editing is done at the drawing stage and we tend not to edit too much in post-production, its more economical. A piece like 'Notebook' or 'Night and Day' will take between 6-12 months to complete, from the drawing and planning stage through to the construction of the set and then finally the filming.

S.T.: How do you describe your work?

J. W. & P.H.: We used to say 'short performance video works' but that does not really apply any more and we have recently started to work more on photographs, drawings and prints to go alongside the video pieces. So it becomes even more complicated to try to encapsulate the work in a short phrase or statement, perhaps we had better leave it to other people to try to describe it...

S.T.: Did you ever create some videos out of your white – cube?

J. W. & P.H.: So far only one, 'Luton' (part of 'twenty six drawing and falling things', which is being shown in Rome) was shot in the back of a large van (a type of van referred to in England as a 'Luton'), which was driven around a 3 minute circuit, near to the studio. Even then we fitted it out to look like a white cube space, and some people refuse to believe we shot it in a van, they think it was made using a rig in the studio. The use of white as a background stems from our interest in drawings and the attempt to make the videos look diagrammatic so I imagine we will continue to use this kind of space. We do have some ideas floating around though, which could involve shooting outdoors or in different types of spaces.

S.T.: Your videos are results of various actions which pass over physical limits. Did it ever happen that some projects were finally unrealizable?

J. W. & P.H.: We constantly surprise ourselves by our ability to forget that gravity exists. Quite a few of our ideas could never be realised. The question of what happens when you take a drawing and try to realize it as a physical action, forms an interesting challenge.

The work of Vito Acconci (b. 1940) treats in a critical, now and then even playful, way aspects of identity politics – the 'self' as a social construct; it is characterised by self-driven research into the relationship between artist and viewer, into how individual and social space are related to one another. The all-encompassing exhibition offers an insight into the practice that this influential artist carried-out in the 1970s, this from the viewpoint of the place that takes language as a catalysing impulse. That is thereby the centre of gravity that shapes Acconci's conceptual, performance-based videos and audio works, wherein he executes an intense dialogue between his body and psyche, the 'I' and the 'you', the public and private space, in the form of stream-of-consciousness monologues. This historic, groundbreaking body of work, distinguished by an unusually psychodramatic intensity, is supplemented in this exhibition by graphic transcriptions of audio works and early poetry works. In these works the physical materialisation of language is central, achieved through means of syntactical experiments and typographical permutations. From the 1980s onwards Acconci's practice shifted in the direction of sculptural interventions and urban projects, progressing his interest in the human body and its relationship to the public space. Connected therewith is a surprising listening space that the artist was contracted to design for the exhibition.

Starting out from the language-based works exhibited at Argos, Vito Acconci is giving a talk on his work, from poetry through video and performance art to architecture and design. It seems that the step from one medium to the next is not such a big one – the focus is always on language and body in relation to space. Kaaistudios – Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 Rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

Karl Holmqvist - I'm with you in Rockland The work of Karl Holmqvist (b.1964) revolves around inter-human communication, experiments with language in all its aspects, and texts that he presents in printed as well as sonic form. In his performances and videos both the spoken and written word feature centrally. In his works Holmqvist often refers to other artists and figures extracted from popular culture, in particular to the world of rock and pop, as well as religion and politics. As a contemporary counterpart to Vito Acconci's historically important language based oeuvre that is being shown in parallel, Argos presents Holmqvist's 'I'm with you in Rockland', a video work that is exclusively composed of a black image with white subtitles, where the artist on the soundtrack navigates between extraneous quotes extracted from the media and pop culture. The text-based piece openly refers to Allen Ginsberg's well-known poem 'Howl' from 1955 (in which the third part has the same title) and adds elements from popular culture together in a way that closely relates to slam poetry. 'I'm With You in Rockland' stimulates, asking the viewer to take an active position; depending on the frame of reference of the recipient the words come across as alternately serious, funny, and moving.

Performance: Karl Holmqvist – You Blew Up my House 13 February 2009, 10pm A spoken word reading that mixes pop culture with song lyrics and political slogans. This text was first written by Holmqvist for The Serpentine Gallery Manifesto Marathon (London, October 2008) where artists were encouraged to present manifestoes for the 21st century. Kaaistudio's, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 Rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, 1000 Brussels, Belgium The lecture and performance are organised in collaboration with the Kaaitheater within the context of Performatik 09.

Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE Until January 11, 2009 Nordrhein-Westfalen Ständehausstraße 1 40217 Düsseldorf +49 (0) 211.8381-600 http://www.kunstsammlung.de

Lawrence Weiner (born 1942, South Bronx, New York) has been long recognized as a central figure among the founders and developers of Conceptual Art, whose origins reach back to the 1960s. The exhibition Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE is the most important retrospective in many years to be devoted to this radical, complex, and epochal artist. Especially in recent years, Weiner has been regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic artists worldwide. He has defined art as "the relationship of human beings to objects and of objects to objects in relation to human beings," and this premise constitutes the core of all of his work to date. For Weiner, language is a material object - whereby the existence of the individual work is nonetheless independent of its material execution. His works address an unending diversity of physical and cultural phenomena, exploiting verbal figures, punctuation marks, and graphic elements as resources in order to transg ress conventional hierarchies and boundaries. Here are works that address matters both simple and complex, challenging viewers in both conceptual and political terms.

The focal point of this exhibition is formed by approximately 50 language works and a number of works executed according to them. Also featured are 10 early paintings, a sculpture, and circa 30 drawings. The presentation also includes circa 200 artist's books and multiples as well as circa 230 posters. The exhibition itself is supplemented by works installed in the city's public spaces and those appearing in a daily newspaper.

The Kunsthalle Fridericianum has invited the Berlin-based conceptual and performance artist Daniel Knorr (b. Bucharest, 1968) to present his performance project Scherben bringen Glück (Shards bring good luck). The project includes the creation of the sculpture City Pills and the ongoing production of spectacles from fragments of old glass during the entire run of the exhibition. The artist aims to make history – literally – visible in this way and to evoke associations with various levels of our culture. Daniel Knorr: 'On the one hand broken glass is a witness to a violent history, on the other it contains everyday cultural meanings and values. In Scherben bringen Glück the glasses stand for the visualisation of this ambivalent relationship.'

Daniel Knorr's work deals with the realationships between performance art, everyday life, public versus private space and the artist and the audience. Pursuing the principle of Conceptual Art, the artist explores the aspect of materialisation in art, calling it into question on various levels. Thoughts, ideas and feelings, but also identity, language and text all contribute to the realisation of his art.

In 2005 Daniel Knorr represented Romania at the Venice Biennale. As an 'anti-concept' he left the pavilion empty revealing the traces of the pavilion's usage over time. At this year's Berlin Biennale, Knorr questioned German history and the notion of national identity in his work Nationalgalerie, which featured the flags of Berlin's student fraternities – notorious for their right-wing stance – as a 'flag frieze' fluttering from the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Knorr's contribution to Manifesta 7 in South Tyrol consisted of removing all the doors from one of the exhibition venues in Rovereto so that the art works on display were freely accessible 24 hours a day. The reactions to this project were documented and discussed in supplements in the local daily paper and in association with a Romanian periodical. The artist's contribution to Copenhagen's U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art caused quite a stir this autumn; Stolen History involved covering t he heads of the city's public sculptures with black balaclavas.

Scherben bringen Glück is the second exhibition, after Christoph Büchel's Deutsche Grammatik, under the new artistic director Rein Wolfs. Over the coming years the Fridericianum will host several more solo projects by Knorr. Wolfs has invited the artist to accompany him for the duration of his tenure in Kassel. 'Daniel Knorr's art stands for a dynamic connection between the conceptual and the performative. It attests to the artist's humanity, wit, dedication and institutional critique. Daniel Knorr will play a vital role in shaping the future profile of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum.'

Jan Verwoert Facing things in a state of crisis: From debt to dedication

Why are conceptual artists painting again? – Because they think it's a good idea. – The building is pleased to present the fourth talk in a monthly series of conversations organized by the art critic Jan Verwoert: Facing things in a state of crisis: From debt to dedication.

As a consequence of the attempt to dismantle certain categorical definitions of what art practice (after conceptualism) is about, the discussions after the previous lectures time and again raised the question: How can we seek to understand the situation that we find ourselves in when we reject a type of thinking that conceptualizes art practice solely in terms of a legitimatory discourse of stated intentions and programmatic declarations? – –

It would seem that, in the absence of programmatic marching orders, we encounter a state of crisis where what is to be done is unclear so that indecision and paralysis automatically ensue. But what, if it was only in this critical situation of indeterminacy that the things that might truly matter for an awareness of what could be done begin to emerge - precisely because they are no longer obscured by overblown heroic narratives of what would have to be done? How to find a language for this moment, when in a state of hiatus, the haecceity of things might most keenly and painfully be perceived? – –

Unprotected by a legitimatory apparatus of programmatic declarations one in fact becomes fully exposed to the desires of others and that entails – in the art world – the painful awareness of one's dependency on the fickleness of those desires of others. Inevitably one ends up in debt, symbolically, financially, emotionally. What to do with this debt? The launch of fast careers might provide fast relief, but will effectively only increase the dependency on those who facilitate those careers. The alignment with established schools of thinking through programmatic conceptual statements may likewise merely reinforce intellectual dependencies that are no less oppressive. – –

So how to face the debt? Maybe by proactively indebting oneself to others - others one loves or remains indebted to, if not haunted by - in an act of dedication. What would it mean to, conceptually, in art practice, move away from a stance of declaration towards one of dedication?

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

Why are conceptual artists painting again? – Because they think it's a good idea. – –

A series of talks and conversations – organized by Jan Verwoert Lecture 3: Saturday, December 6th, 7PM – The building is pleased to present the third talk in a monthly series of conversations organized by the art critic Jan Verwoert.

How to Drill a Hole Into a Hole On hermeticism and the heroic in the conceptualization of art practice

If we now understand conceptual art as foregrounding, not just ideas, but the making of decissions - as art, as that which art is about, as the definition of the artistic act - the question is: How do we conceptualize the act of making decissions in art?

The conventional answer to this question is that intentions determine decissions: Conceptual artists should know clearly what to do - and do it in such a way that it becomes transparent what their intentions were when they make their move. An ideal of transparency is therefore the basis for the definition of conceptual works as singular strategical moves. The demand, however, to know exactly why you do what you do (before you ever even do it) has increased the pressure on artists to occupy the genius-like position of a strategist who would clearly know the only right thing to do. The effects of this are positively stifling. So there must other ways of conceptualising the artistic act than as a clear declaration of intentions.

The previous talk was an attempt to replace the notion of intention with that of inspiration and the ideal of transparency with the notion of keeping and sharing secrets to conceptualize what may be at stake in the artistic act. This talk will continue the discussion of the concept as secret, based on the observation of a crucial shift in the understanding of conceptualism: While many protagonists of first generation conceptualism, in a modernist tradition, insisted that conceptual art could be a transparent, straightforward and hence universially understandable language, we today encounter conceptualism as a hermetic idiom, an art of secrets. In fact, much neo-conceptual art of the 1990s rediscovered conceptual art as secret art and consciously proposed hermeticism as a mode of engagement with the work. What happened? How can we conceptualize this shift?

Undeniably, the concept of the artistic act as a clear declaration of intentions tacitly also propagates an ideal of the heroic. The act of taking a clear position, decidedly, critically, antagonistically evokes a scenario of dramatic struggle. Assuming that the question of authorship – how to be someone who creates something that makes a critical difference – continues to be a source for drama, the question remains: What roles and techniques could be invented for playing this drama differently, unheroically, in ways that are less stifling and paranoid, but no less (pleasurably and seriously) dramatic?

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea.

What is the future of medium-specific practices after Conceptualism? What is the future of Conceptual Art after the 1990s?

How have the basic conditions of art practice changed and what words and models could we use to open up the potentials at the heart of these developments in art after Conceptualism?

The dominant models no longer satisfy. It makes no sense to melodramatically invoke the »end of painting« (or any other medium-specific practice for that part) when the continous emergence of fascinating work obviously proves apocalyptic endgame scenarios wrong. Yet, to pretend it were possible to go back to business as usual seems equally impossible because the radical expansion of artistic possibilities through the landslide changes of the 1960s leave medium-specific practices in the odd position of being one among many modes of artistic articulation, with no preset justification. How can we describe then what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today?

Likewise, it seems, that we can still not quite convincingly describe to ourselves what Conceptual Art can be: An art of pure ideas? As if »pure« idea art were ever possible let alone desirable! An art of smart strategic moves and puns? We have advertising agencies for that. The social and political dimension of Conceptualism has been discussed, but often only in apodictic terms, not acknowledging the humour, the wit, the existential, emotional or erotic aspects, as well as the iconophile, not just iconoclast motives, that have always also been at play in the dialectics and politics of life-long conceptual practices.

The talk will start off a series of monthly talks and conversations about the conditions of contemporary practice. The idea is to invent a new language together in discussions that could describe the potentials of contemporary practice; a language that would acknowledge a shared sense of crisis and doubt, yet fight the senseless paranoia over legitimation that too much bad-faith criticism today exploits in the wake of second-generation institutional critique. In other words: how could, in response to the concerns of contemporary art practice, a critical vocabulary be developed that would break the spell of the oedipal infatuation with the laws of (institutional) legitimacy - and instead help to transform criticism into a truly gay science based on a shared sense of appreciation and irreverence?

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

The building is an e-flux project in cooperation with Fruit & Flower Deli. The building is open Thursday through Saturday, 12 – 6 pm. Come visit! contact Magdalena Magiera: Magdalena@e-flux.com

Ian Wallace (*1943) is numbered alongside Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum as one of the leading figures of conceptual photography in Canada. As professor at the University of British Columbia he taught amongst others Jeff Wall. While his works are in the collections of leading museums in Canada and the USA, he is yet little known in Europe. The parallel exhibitions in the Witte de With, Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich and the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf focus respectively upon specific aspects of Ian Wallace's work. A thematic approach has been adopted in lieu of a chronological retrospective, which duly situates Wallace's diverse and fascinating Œuvre as well as its topicality, within a European context.

Ian Wallace will be talking with Vanessa Joan Müller about his work, the construction of imagery, the relation of photography and painting as well as the Vancouver School and his artist colleagues such as Jeff Wall.

The same evening the opening of the new exhibition by Christine Moldrickx (*1984) in the project space Schaufenster Kunstverein (Neustr. 10) will take place. Christine Moldrickx invited Peter Ewig to show his films in the Salon des Amateurs (bar in the Kunsthalle, Grabbeplatz 4) from 6 till 7.30 pm.

Ian Wallace is one of the main contributors to the development of conceptual art in Vancouver, an art scene which has attracted world-wide attention since the early 1970s. Wallace's career began in the mid '60s, when he took up a professorship at The University of British Columbia, where Jeff Wall was among his students. He continued to teach until the late '90s whilst developing his own artistic practice. He is an artist with a strong interest in avant-garde strategies and has developed a pictorial idiom that combines monochrome painting and documentary photography. Even though Wallace's work is part of many North American museums and private collections, until now his practice has remained under-exposed in Europe.

Instead of adopting the format of a chronological display, each institution will take a constellation of key works as a point of departure. Designed as a trilogy, the three institutions each present a unique exhibition thematically linked to a public program. At the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the twelve-part panorama Lookout (1979) will offer a focus for considerations of the construction of imagery. In Kunsthalle Zürich, Attack on Literature (1975) will focus the inquiry on questioning poetics and the tensions between image and text. In Witte de With, the photo-murals The Summerscript (1974), The Idea of the University (1990), and Clayoquot Protest (1993) will be central, along with the installation of At Work (2008), a suite of works including a video and photographs in which we see the artist questioning his own role.

Biography Ian Wallace was born in 1943 in Shoreham, England and now lives and works in Vancouver. His previous exhibitions include group and solo presentations in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In 2005, he participated in the group exhibition Intertidal at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA). Recent solo exhibitions include Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York (2008) and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver (2007). He continues to be an influential artist, teacher and writer.

Publication – A Literature of Images In conjunction with this three-part survey exhibition Witte de With, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen and the Kunsthalle Zürich together with Sternberg Press (Berlin/New York) will publish the most extensive monographic catalogue to date of Ian Wallace's work. Drawing together and providing further context for the exhibitions, the book combines art historical and theoretical texts by Vanessa Joan Müller, Dieter Roelstraete and Jacques RanciÃ¨re, an interview with the artist by Renske Janssen, as well as a chronology, catalogue of exhibited works and thorough bibliographic information. The richly illustrated catalogue is designed by Surface (Frankfurt/Berlin).

In the 1960s California was the centre of the counterculture and the Mecca of the hippie movement. Grappling with questions of how to define the artwork gave rise to new forms of expression such as performances, happenings and video art. A focus on the conceptual, process-based and ephemeral aspects of art took the place of "retinal" art forms such as painting and sculpture. Studies of phenomenological matters such as space, light and sounds, explorations of identity and gender politics, along with the relationship between artwork and viewer became dominant themes in art.

The Californian art scene played a significant part in ensuring that the neo-avant-garde gained ground. However, nowadays relatively little attention is paid to the major developments in Californian conceptual art - with the exception of a few central artists such as Bruce Nauman, Garry Hill and Bill Viola. The exhibition project Conceptual Art From California turns its gaze on this scene and presents work from the n.b.k. Video Forum's collection along with selected works from other sources. One of the core elements in this presentation is the video programme curated by Constance Lewallen for the exhibition Facing Eden: 100 Years of Bay Area Landscape at M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, 1995. This brings together numerous artists examining topics such as ecology and human alienation from nature, along with socio-political issues such as migration and security policy. The exhibition is complemented by a series of works by non-Californian artists, which either relate to specific pieces by artists such as Bruce Nauman or Chris Burden, or reference the Californian situation in general.

Thursday, November 13, 7pm Artist/Politician: A California Statewide Artists Collaboration, 1978 A lecture by Lowell Darling (artist) in English language

In his notes on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt wrote: "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. Irrational judgments lead to new experience. Formal art is essentially rational. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically." Where is the difference between rationality and irrationality? The artists that curator Valerie Smith has brought together for her first exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, explore various states of mind that have lead to new perceptions of reality at the boundaries of logic. The Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1911 – 1989) the Chilean Juan Downey, (1940 – 1993) and the German Hanne Darboven are the key figures representing divergent thought processes in the exhibition, but who share qualities of persistence and discipline. Their work offers insight into calculated ways of thinking that ultimately have lead to individual mantra.

Bispo's works, which he called "registers of my passage on earth", are the tireless obsessions of a man endlessly inventorying his past and present to assure his place in the future. His tireless preparations for Judgement Day materialised into exhaustive lists of everything he knew meticulously embroidered on bed linens and occasionally bound around hospital furniture. These works have earned him admiration by contemporary artists, who find inspiration in his passion.

Downey's pioneering work in early video, his use of the media to penetrate the remotest parts of the Latin world and his resistance to the political corruption in his native Chile have made him a model for artists today. Downey anticipated an anthropological approach to independent broadcasting with large doses of social critique. His ironic approach to video coupled with his reverence for indigenous culture and their integrated way of life perfectly reveals the dilemma of his age caught between technology and a need to escape prescribed notions of "progress."

Inspired by Robert Wiene's classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Javier Téllez (Venezuela) and amateur actors from the Vivantes Clinic in Neuköln produced a film installation especially commissioned for Haus der Kulturen der Welt whose setting takes place in and around the Einstein Tower in Potsdam. The celebration of difference, both social and psychological, guides Telléz's vision and his public message. Following Downey's footsteps, Warszawa based artists, Paweł Althamer with Artur Żmijewski, break with social conventions in So genannte Wellen und andere Phänomene des Geites, a series of eight DVDs, which record their experiments with consciousness-changing drugs. Althamer, and occasional friends, immerse themselves in the pure wonderment of prenatal worlds, delving into primal instincts to chemically attain unadulterated states of awe.

In the montages of news sequences and interviews created by François Bucher (Colombia), a concentrated game-within-a-game evolves in the interstice between reality and fiction. His work centres on the violent psyche caught between tension, terror and manipulation. Severa Vigilancia ("Haute Surveillence") a dual DVD projection, is an allusion to Jean Genet's work, in reference to Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. In Bucher's work, the boundary between staged and real violence is disquietingly vague.

The systematic organisation and presentation of time plays a vital role in the works of German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven. The contrast between the severity of the formal language of a calendar and the fluidity of the artist's handwriting in Kalendergeschichten, (Kalender 1976 b) ("Calendar Stories"), pushes the work to the point where control and meaning are transcended and another realm of perception becomes apparent.

Exhibition curator, Valerie Smith, is head of the Department of Visual Art, Film and Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin since May 2008. Before that she was Chief Curator and Exhibition Director at the Queens Museum of Art, curator at Artists Space in New York and artistic director of Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

A front figure in contemporary art since the 1960s, the Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT has played a pioneering and vital role in the development of performance and feminism and activist strategies as well as conceptual photography and film. Index presents an introductory exhibition of VALIE EXPORT's work which focuses on strategies for self-definition and feminism, including a selection of her films and performative photography.

In 1970 the artist adopted a new artistic identity with the name VALIE EXPORT, always written in capital letters, as an act of self-definition, and thus pointing out an objective which pervades her oeuvre. "Action Pants: Genital Panic", (1969) defines an active femininity which acts both politically and sexually.

In one of her first films, "Selbstportrait mit Kopf" (1966) the artist's face merge together with but also detaches from the image of an expected femininity, here expressed in a classical sculpture of a woman's head. "Mann & Frau & Animal" (1970-73) is an act of sexual self-definition but then also a survey of the relation between image and representation, something that reappears throughout her artistic career, beautifully expressed for instance in her film "Syntagma" (1984). The feature film "Unsichtbare Gegner" (1976), screened at Cinemateket Stockholm in November, is a science fiction with inspiration from Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) and at the same time a strong and humoristic showdown pointing at the woman's alienation in society. Several elements from "Unsichtbare Gegner" can also be found in the later work "Syntagma". VALIE EXPORT very early on recycled images and sequences from her own production into new works, an artistic strategy that ques tions the traditional idea of the image's authenticity.

VALIE EXPORT investigates the body as a membrane between society and identity, a membrane which is also image and sign and where the female body is inscribed into the structures of society. In "Body Sign Action" (1970) the artist tattoos a suspender on her thigh, an image of female submission and seduction. Through appropriation and renegotiation of a generally accepted image of femininity and sexuality, "Body Sign Action" proposes a different and more active definition. VALIE EXPORT has from the very early works used the image of herself in her production, for example in large numbers of performance works and in photography which through the usage of her own body also is based on performative actions. The point of departure is related to a subjective position but in spite of the fact that the artist often uses her own body, she avoids referring to her personal history.

In the exhibition a selection from her extensive production of performative photography is included: "Körperkonfiguration" (1982), in which the body is inscribed in the architecture of the city.

VALIE EXPORT has consistently continued to link artistic and political strategies to structural examinations of the image as language and of the relationship between image and representation. There is an unbroken conceptual line from the early works, like "Mann & Frau & Animal", to one of her more recent works: "I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head" (2008), a video using a performance during the Venice biennial opening 2007 as a starting point. In the performance the artist reads a text while her vocal cords are being filmed.

VALIE EXPORT has during her artistic career also been active as a writer and curator. Together with Silvia Eiblmayr she is curating the Austrian pavilion at the Venice biennial 2009.

Orchard is pleased to announce the opening of Cookie-Cutter, an exhibition by Christian Philipp Müller, on January 6, 2008. The exhibition takes place in two parts; beginning on January 23, it will feature artist book collaborations by designer Luc Derycke, MER Paper Kunsthalle.

The first part of Cookie-Cutter presents three works by Müller: »Infill« (2008), »Floating Arch« (2008) and »Interpellations« (1994). »Interpellations« is an archive of altered travel guides, listings and maps that describes New York's downtown art neighborhood SoHo circa 1994 and explores the fashioning of descriptions of a single gallery which may or may not have been included in the original materials. Müller first presented this work at American Fine Arts, Co. in that same year, and now exhibits four of its six book vitrines fourteen years later at Orchard. »Infill« and »Floating Arch« are new sculptural works, each of which responds to the perception, physicality and place of Orchard while extending the analogy to American Fine Arts, Co. presented by »Interpellations.«

These works are accompanied by a new film by Jeff Preiss that takes as its foundation the Lower East Side walking tour Müller performed during November and December of 2006 (from Müller's, Zoe Leonard's and Petra Wunderlich's »Around the Corner«). Preiss's film is presented with one of Wunderlich's black and white photographs of local synagogues seen at Orchard in »Around the Corner.«

To articulate the ideas animating Müller's exhibition and its relationships to the history of American Fine Arts Co., Orchard will host a round table entitled »On the Legacy of Colin De Land,« moderated by art historian James Meyer on January 10 at 7pm.

The second part of the exhibition begins on January 23 when a temporary bookstore will present artist book collaborations by Belgian designer Luc Derycke, MER Paper Kunsthalle. The bookstore will feature a program of nightly events, starting on January 23 with a conversation between Matt Mullican and Derycke about their book collaborations (7 p.m.). On January 24, Brethren of the Free Spirit will host the official release of their new album All Things are from Him, through Him and in Him, with two performances by Jozef van Wissam and James Blackshaw (at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.).

January 25: Reading and book launch, Adam Lehner, "Re-Arrangement," at 7 p.m. A complete program of MER paper Kunsthalle events is forthcoming at orchard47.org.